The director of the National Galleries of Scotland warns that a proposal to redistribute art across the country’s galleries will backfire. “What will happen in Scotland unless we are very careful is that local authorities will say to themselves that they need to have a museum which they do not have already, so all the smaller galleries and museums in Perth, Dundee and Auchterarder – places like that – will all have art centres. If you do have a geographical redistribution of works of art in Scotland, it will mean that the relatively small metropolitan collections will be redistributed, or the monies will be redistributed from them, which will make them ineffective.”